“Language is a skin”

I think about this and contemplate the folds and pores of my writing. I wonder if it ages through repetition and predictable motifs throughout the years, if the words need scrubbing or stretching. I imagine the skin of sentences skimming the surface of a lake, pressing palm to the wrinkles in what someone else wrote. If our meditations have met through an accidental collision, or an intentional caress. If the words feel a prick or a burn when things break down, if they seek shelter from precipitation. I am certain a poem senses electricity in the air and comes out, on some nights, to invite sudden light into its lines.